Chris Boese's Weblog

Should J-Schools plunge into the land of critical thinking Gen Ed Requirements?

Dan Gillmor poses the question, but having come from the land of departments with HEAVY "service" loads to institutions (English, Composition, Rhetoric), I'd sure add a MASSIVE caveat to this idea.

I mean, it is a great idea in principle. I support it fully, especially as Dan enunciates it below. However, in U.S. post-secondary institutions, what such an endeavor would probably bring with it (besides a TON of adjunct teaching jobs for newly-laid off veteran journalists, as keepers of the anachronistic journalistic tea service, as it were) is the purely EVIL specter of a TON of adjunct teaching positions, flooding the permanent academic ghetto underclass with even more second-class humanities teachers with no hope of ever entering the tenured ranks.

It would have to be done smartly and with foresight, with protections for faculty who could easily within a few budget years, morph into an army of opportunistic-administration classroom fodder, just as so many composition teachers are now. Something should be learned by the humanities evil experiments with its permanent adjunct underclass in the first-year composition general education requirements, requirements that at many institutions into first-year experience courses, beyond writing to learn, to embrace more critical thinking and reading goals.

What I'd want to know, Dan, is how these proposals are different from the existing programs, the existing service requirements, because these very ideas, including media literacy and cultural literacy readings, have long been part of first-year composition programs, and first-year experience programs, as well as honors seminars and the like.

And those programs are already being taught by faculty members in other disciplines, faculty enriched with a deeper disciplinary reading background in cultural studies and critical theory than most journalism faculty currently have. There is already a rich set of media criticism and popular culture course readers that attempt to do just what Dan proposes, and these courses are already being taught, albeit not by people with any background as working journalists.

How do we know this idea isn't the same thing in different clothes?

I'm guessing what Dan wants to see, in this particular moment for citizen and participatory social media, are better results from the critical media courses that are taught.

Here, let me lay out the gist of Dan's ideas. I'm putting BOLD on my favorite bits below.

Link: Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community – Center for Citizen Media.

Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper in Community

Feb 7th, 2009

by Dan Gillmor.

Accepting an award from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably “the best general education that an American citizen can get” today.

[...]

It’s open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead — if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts.

Some of the shifts are already under way, especially in how journalism educators do their jobs. The Cronkite School, where I’m teaching, is one of many journalism programs aiming to be part of the 21st Century. The school understands at its core that digital technology has transformed the practice, though we hope not the principles, of the craft. This is welcome, if overdue; if newspapers have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower.

But that recognition, while valuable, isn’t nearly enough. Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.

We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.

For media consumers:

• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media Techniques

For media creators (after incorporating the above):

• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency

(See this recent paper, part of the Media Re:public project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where I’m a Fellow, for a fairly lengthy description of the principles and an explanation of why I believe they’re important.)

[...]

This applies not just to students studying the practice of journalism. The same issues are roiling public relations and advertising, the teaching of which is often housed in schools of journalism and communications. Not surprisingly, because modern commerce has been so much about selling things, those industries have been considerably more innovative, in the professional ranks, than journalism in recent years. Key leaders in advertising and PR are surely making their needs clear to educators, and one suspects getting results.

As noted above, journalism schools are starting to embrace digital technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have to invent their own jobs, however, much less helping them do so.

[...]

But I keep coming back to the issue(s) that should trouble anyone who cares about the future of self-governed societies. We’re not turning out the critical thinkers we need in a time when that skill has never been so important, particularly when the avalanche of data — some of it bogus and much of it irrelevant — has never been so difficult to handle.

One experiment, at State University of New York’s Stony Book campus, is notable. Howard Schneider is leading another foundation-funded program (so many of these are, raising an interesting question that I won’t go into here) that aims to make better news consumers and critical thinkers of all students, not just those enrolled in journalism courses. This goes only part of the way to what I’d like to see in journalism education, but it’s a very useful start.

Where would I take it, if I ran a journalism school? I’d start, again, with the principles listed above, and rework the how-to part of the curriculum to be more digital (that is, media-agnostic) and entrepreneurially focused.

[...]

Then, tackling the media activism challenge, my colleagues and I would:

• •  Persuade the president of the university that every student on the campus should learn them before graduating, preferably during freshman year.
• •  Create a program for people in the broader community, starting with teachers. We should be seeing every student take a basic media activist course at every level of education — not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school.
• •  Offer that program to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves. Children especially need to learn to be independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear, or read is necessarily true or real.
• •  Provide for-fee training to communicators who work in major local institutions, such as PR and marketing folks from private companies, governmental organizations and others. If they could be persuaded that the principles matter, they might offer the public less BS and more reality, and they’d be better off for the exercise.
• •  Try to enlist another vital player in this effort: local media. The traditional journalism organizations should be making this a core part of their missions, but haven’t yet realized why, namely that their own trust in the community would almost certainly rise if they helped people understand these principles — not to mention the enormous value of truly engaging the audience in the journalism itself. New media entrants would benefit, too, if they embraced the principles of media activism to produce higher quality work and deepen their own conversations with their communities of geography and interest.

All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. We’re not the only ones who can do this, but we may be among the best equipped. If we don’t, someone else will.

Ad Age says news-oriented websites have a future, but only if they colonize interactive media in the name of one-to-many MASS media content and push a dying ad model on a rejecting audience

Warning: Highly opinionated rant follows. Blah.

Link: Report: News-oriented Websites Have a Future - Advertising Age - MediaWorks.

This article from Advertising Age is purely E-VILE, so I say. It lives deep in horseless carriage-land, or as another version of "Give a mass media-paradigm-biased analyst a hammer and he suddenly decides everything needs pounding."

The advertising model is dying, and THAT MODEL itself is what's killing newspapers, but what does this analyst call for but MORE PUSH ADVERTISING TO MASS AUDIENCES OF BILLIONS?

Adage.com benevolently decides that there's still hope for the dying newspaper industry, but only if it forces the one-to-many broadcast model to more fully colonize the interactive, many-to-many online ecosystems that are rejecting the ad-supported content model in the first place through time-shifted, ad-skipped viewing, social media interfaces, and unbound content feeds.

But nooooo, what AdAge says newspapers need to do to become more profitable and viable online (and to pay actual quality reporters) is to go back to that Old Time Religion.

The challenge for all sites is garnering enough traffic and creating a discernable enough brand to make advertisers seek them out.

"Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million," Ms. Fine writes.

Those ambitious numbers, she continues, show how hard it is for local news sites to be really profitable, and underscore "why local papers will have trouble offsetting traditional media declines" with revenue from their websites.

The report also looks at whether the Times could ever succeed as a web-only product, and concludes that it could -- once NYT.com starts generating 1.3 billion page views a month.

Another sign of the short-sightedness of this approach:

Yahoo, AOL at billion mark
Ms. Fine said sites such as Yahoo News and AOL News already get in the neighborhood of a billion page views a month, and it's not out of the question that NYT.com could too.

"The fact that there are sites out there that are already achieving that suggests that this could work," she said in an interview.

Yahoo and AOL are diverse and INTERACTIVE portals, not finely honed and researched creators of quality content.

In other words, Yahoo and AOL may feature internally-generated content, but it sprawls across a virtual destination that is not fixed or funneled into a narrow set of editorial standards. To compare the NYTimes and its communication model to Yahoo and AOL (which easily pipe out the same AP and Reuters wire content as NYTimes does, but deliver nothing like the same content) is to reveal the lack of understanding of both the content model AND the communications model by people with an inherent MASS media, PUSH ADS, passive consumption bias.

It's like the very idea of Long Tail interactivity patterns never even entered into this analysis, which is based entirely on economies of scale in mass form only.

What's happening to journalism and journalists right now

You hear the news of the layoffs across the board, hitting the big papers, the big TV stations, the big chain media conglomerates (Gannett, Time Warner, Tribune Co).

But it doesn't really sink in until you understand an ENTIRE GENERATION of experienced journalistic talent is being lost. Yes, that was also lost in the late 1980s (I remember 800 people laid off in a fell swoop when the two Little Rock, AR newspapers merged, because that town wasn't big enough for the two of them, according to Gannett. That was repeated in Tulsa, repeated in Anchorage, AK, repeated everywhere). 

But the current purge is making the Reagan media deregulation, which ushered in the era of media monoculture monopoly, the anti-thesis of the "penny press" which, like the blogosphere, let a thousand journalistic flowers bloom, look like child's play.

Instead, the consolidation of the Reagan years left the media ecosystem INTENSELY vulnerable to a single attack of a bark beetle that seems to be wiping out dead tree media, among other things. And that was all in the name of protecting 20-30% shareholder profit margins in the 80s (not exactly an easy PR move to make, to tell all those people you were depriving of their livelihood that it was all in the name of profit margins that retailers and manufacturers haven't seen in decades).

The excuse now is that the gaping pie hole of the Internet isn't sucking up enough of the costs of print media, so to old media monopoly barons that means CONTENT CREATORS have to go. Because no one on the Internet craves news content and analysis, or topical or beat coverage at all, nuh-uh.

You don't think this is screwing up our world? Read the story below, and cry, not for this resilient laid-off reporter. Cry for yourselves, because we will all be deprived of ready access to his and other talented writers' work.

Except for that profitless, frictionless, RSS distribution system that is the Blogosphere.

All Hail the Long Tail!

Link: Gannett reporter made "independent" by noon: Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon.

Former Gannett environmental reporter becomes "independent" by noon

By Bruce Richie

I started out this morning as a reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. I ended the work day as an "independent journalist."

At 8:45 I headed over to Marpan Recycling to work on a story about the state's goal of achieving 75 percent recycling by 2020. That was the goal spelled out earlier this year in a comprehensive state energy bill. And the goal is about three times as much as the state is recycling now.

At Marpan, they're recycling about 2/3 of the construction waste that comes in. Concrete, metal, cardboard and wood are the main products that are sold to recyclers along with mulch.

Marpan's Kim Williams said the state could boost recycling if people purchased more products from recycled materials to boost markets. Starting in January, all construction waste now going to Leon County's landfill will go through Marpan first for recycling.

Upon heading into the office shortly after 10, I was called into the office of Executive Editor Bob Gabordi. I knew what was coming, especially when I saw managing editor Africa Price there.

I was being laid off, Bob explained, and he asked if I had any questions. I could have responded more politely but frankly I was annoyed. My job had already been changed three times this year, and now I was being put out of work. But we shook hands, they offered to help me and I offered to help them in the future. There was a modest severance package.

   Then I went home. I checked my e-mails. I returned a few phone calls. And I didn't know what to do next.

   So I ate my lunch and went to work.

   I went to the same state hearing that I had been planning on going to. But now I wasn't a Tallahassee Democrat reporter.

[...]

About 100 people attended, many of them from county recycling programs. Speakers chimed in with ideas about how the state could better educate residents to recycle or how it needs to create new markets for recyclable materials.

It seemed like news to me, but I was the only reporter there to cover it. And I wasn't even a newspaper reporter any more. Perhaps the other media were at the Environmental Regulation Commission meeting across town, where an important vote was scheduled on whether to adopt California's auto emissions. Or maybe they were not there either.

Earlier this year I would have covered the ERC instead. But my environmental reporting job got axed on Aug. 1 and I was reassigned to cover Leon County. Since recycling is inherently local, I figured I could at least cover the interesting concept of recycling 75 percent of our waste.

In this age of change, I feel certain there is a place for me to report on the important issues in Florida's Capital. Maybe I'll become a blogger, combined with some freelancing, combined with being on welfare. The reality hasn't really set in yet.

[...]

What gives me the most joy about the presidential election

It was hard to detail all the things we lost as eight years of cronyism and anti-intellectualism, the disempowering of expertise, research, studies, and specialists began. But isn't it fascinating, now in hindsight, to look back and compare the different outcomes from the radically different worldviews?

I know postmodernists like to take potshots at the Enlightenment, but like literacy, the Enlightenment gave an important base for the pomos to branch off FROM. The Bush "post-rationalists" were a nightmare of authoritarian relativism, and I am of great hope that some good academic types will spend  time exploring all the various aspects and contradictions and ironies embodied in authoritarian relativism, not just in its thought processes, but also in its outcomes, in the thorny knots in public affairs it tied us all up in.

Like "proving" absence, as when the U.S. demanded Saddam Hussein "prove" he didn't have WMD. I've revisited this conundrum recently, while listening to Ron Suskind's "The Way of the World" and "One-Percent Solution" on audio book. Suskind of course was the one who first clued us in on how deep the post-rationalist thinking went, with his famous quotation about the Bush Administration's loose association with the so-called "reality-based universe."

But the demand on Saddam to prove absence, which left me gasping at the time for its unabashed fallacious thinking, is made even worse when we see in "The Way of the World" that the British spy agency had turned an internal security officer high up in Saddam's government, an officer who was offering detailed and highly credible information about Saddam's WMD programs before the war started, but it wasn't the information the Bushies wanted to hear, so the source was blown off, not even used as an intelligence asset DURING the war.

And of course, Cheney's twisted logic that gave us the "one-percent solution" remains probably the most logically tortured post-rational policy in the history of the modern world.

But now... BRAINS ARE BACK! Yay!

Link: Goodbye, Anti-intellectualism. Brains are Back! | Newsweek Voices - Michael Hirsh | Newsweek.com.

THE WORLD FROM WASHINGTON Michael Hirsh

Brains Are Back!

After eight years of proud incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, we now have a leader who values nuance and careful thought.

Published Nov 7, 2009

For two days now Americans have celebrated the idea that we may have atoned finally for our nation's original sin, slavery, along with its long legacy of racism. We have rejoiced in the world's accolades over the election of a multicultural African-American to the presidency after nearly eight years of cringing in shame as the Bush administration methodically curdled our Constitutional values and sullied our global reputation as a beacon of hope. Every once in a while, it seems, we Americans do manage to live up to our ideals rather than betray them. Hooray!

I am just as happy as everyone else over all this global good feeling. But there's something else that I'm even happier about--positively giddy, in fact. And the effects of this change are likely to last a lot longer than the brief honeymoon Barack Obama will enjoy as a symbol of realized ideals. What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemy and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.

I'm under no illusion that Barack Obama will turn out to be Barack Panacea. In terms of holding major office, he's the least experienced president in memory. He'll probably screw up a lot of things, especially at first. The problems he faces – from the economic crisis to Iran's nuclear program – are just too hard. And I occasionally worry that in his eloquent eagerness to empathize and reach across cultural barriers, Obama may overreach in the opposite direction from Bush, stumbling into the appeasement of adversaries like Iran (whose buffoonish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, practically invited him to do so this week by sending him the first letter of congratulations from Tehran since 1979). Obama must also guard against the sort of intellectual arrogance that characterized the "best and the brightest" of the Vietnam era.

But, frankly, these are all risks worth taking after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought. We can finally go back to respecting logic and reason and studiousness under a president who doesn't seem to care much about what is "left," "right" or ideologically pure. Or what he thinks God is saying to him. A guy who keeps religion in its proper place—in the pew. It's no accident that Obama is the first Northern Democrat to be elected president since John F. Kennedy. The "Sun Belt" politics represented by George W. Bush – the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism--"has for the moment played itself out," says presidential historian Robert Dallek.

[...]

One tragedy of the Bush administration is the amount of American brain power and talent that went unused, the options that went unconsidered, because they were seen to lack ideological purity. That era is over as we confront a desperate landscape—a serious recession and two prolonged wars. While he hasn't yet invoked Franklin Roosevelt, Obama seems to be embracing FDR's pragmatic approach in 1933 -- knowing that what the country may need, economically and politically, is not so much an organized program but a hodgepodge of bold experiments like the New Deal. "It is common sense to take a method and try it," FDR said back then. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

[...]

And finally, we won't have to pretend any more, for the sake of civil conversation, that invading Iraq was a rational act. George W. Bush cited not a single study to justify such a dramatic move, nor did he convene a single strategic meeting to discuss it. (Did it ever occur to anyone to ask where the conceptual linkage between the rise of al Qaeda and the lack of democracy in the Arab world came from? The answer is: nowhere. No such study exists.) In order to sell this neck-wrenching and nonsensical shift away from the actual culprits of 9/11—al Qaeda--to the American public, Bush then broadened the grim and necessary war in Afghanistan into the strategic monstrosity we now routinely refer to as the "global war on terror." Because this became the official ideology of his administration, and because so many major media pundits and Democrats also persuaded themselves it was valid, we've all felt compelled to pay deference to it.

[That will be the hangover from the Bush Administration, all the various ingrained media genuflections to anti-logic by repetition and party-line marching, almost like a series of verbal tics that suddenly and radically become absurd posturing, in an instant, in a blinking of an eye, as the exposed spin-fiction no longer holds power, no longer carries force beyond the exigencies of currying favor with an Emperor's New Clothes administration no longer in power.

I wonder if some in the media will even notice that they are waking up from a bad dream. I imagine there will be some, the true sophistic media relativists (as opposed to the authoritarian relativists on the right) who will simply move their tape recorders to the other side of the political spectrum and transcribe as faithfully from that power group as it did from the anti-intellectual power group, without parsing that arguments are now supported by real studies, by policy papers, by entire meta-ethical schools of thought that have been subjected to critical review, replicable data, and comparative historical outcomes. There will be some in the media, I suppose, who won't even notice the difference. But some will.]

But now President-to-be Obama, who first came to national attention back in 2002 arguing that Iraq was a "dumb" war unrelated to the real fight against al Qaeda (a fact now borne out by the resurgence of the Taliban in the only battlefront that ever really counted, Afghanistan and Pakistan), will dictate a new reality in Washington. The "media elites" who've managed to escape whipping for their strategic blindness will have to quietly acknowledge this reality, even if they can't bring themselves to admit their errors. Victors, it is said, write the history. Obama is now about to write America's new history. Unless I mistake my man, its theme will be that reason and sense and that cardinal American virtue--pragmatism--are going to rule once again. And that's really something to celebrate.

The Night They Were Dancing in the Streets -- Daily Intel -- New York News Blog -- New York Magazine

Link: The Night They Were Dancing in the Streets -- Daily Intel -- New York News Blog -- New York Magazine.

A scene from Fort Greene last night. Photo: Getty Images

Or, as it led on another story by a neighbor, I guess, Andrew O'Hehir at Salon:

Link: I watched Fox News for five hours last night | Salon News.

I watched Fox News for five hours last night

By Andrew O'Hehir

Nov. 5, 2008 | On my way toward the prodigious outdoor party that broke out shortly after 11 p.m. on the streets of Fort Greene, the multiracial Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood where I live -- a party to celebrate a moment of generational and political shift in America unlike anything I've ever experienced -- I spent a few hours with a somewhat different demographic. But I'm not here to kick sand in the face of the Fox News Channel. For the first time in its existence, Fox on Election Night 2008 seemed a weak and piteous thing, trying to cover its nakedness with shreds of dignity, and staring mortality right in the face.

[...]

 

About 2,000 people celebrating in my neighborhood

My neighbor Dave was out surfing the crowd that centered around Madiba restaurant in Fort Greene (about a block or two from my house) and flowed through the street and down to Fort Greene Park. I was already in my jammies and couldn't drag myself away from the TV coverage of the big party in Chicago at Grant Park. A VERY emotional night, and now, a whole new world to walk around in! What an amazing time to be alive!

Photos by David Malouf

 

Rachel Maddow: Another silly fan gushing, but what great stuff to gush about!

Great New York magazine profile of Rachel Maddow, officially out tomorrow, I guess, but so many good lines and pithy observations that I just had to pull out my favorite bits here, so you will be certain not to miss them.

(FWIW: I also gushed previously, with pictures, when MSNBC first launched Maddow's new show)

I didn't write any of this, but am excerpting from Jessica Pressler's great story, and maybe adding my own snarky comments.

Link: The Secret to Rachel Maddow's Success -- New York Magazine.

The Dr. Maddow Show

The secret to the success of a wonky lesbian pundit with no TV experience? A Ph.D. from Oxford, a dry sense of humor, and the ability to be nice to Pat Buchanan.

By Jessica Pressler Published Nov  2, 2008

Ever heard of something called Dada?”

Rachel Maddow is trying to make an analogy. It’s mid-October, two weeks before the election, and the MSNBC host is comparing the McCain campaign’s recent fixation on “Joe the Plumber” to the anti-bourgeois cultural movement of the early-twentieth century. But this is prime time, and Maddow first has to define Dadaism in as colloquial a way as possible. This is something of a challenge considering she only has about twelve seconds.

“Deliberately being irrational, rejecting standard assumptions about beauty or organization or logic,” she begins. “It’s an anti-aesthetic statement about the lameness of the status quo … kind of?” She twists her face into a cartoon grimace that morphs into a wide smile. “Why am I trying to explain Dadaism on a cable news show thirteen days from this big, giant, historic, crazy, important election that we’re about to have?” she asks with a self-deprecating laugh, as she recognizes the Dadaishness of her own quest. “Because that’s what I found myself Googling today, in search of a way to make sense of the latest McCain-Palin campaign ad!”

It’s hard to imagine many other cable news hosts going down that particular rabbit hole. (Can you picture Glenn Beck referring to the existentialists to make a point?)

[Yeah, but Glenn Beck is finally and fully OFF CNN's Headline News, and good riddance! That racist creephead was easily my biggest source of embarrassment while I was working there (although the Natalie Holloway non-story comes in a close second). But meanwhile, Beck goeth happily to Fox News, and gets replaced by... wait for it, wait for it! Another out-lesbian celebrity-crime broadcaster! What programming genius!]

But then again, Rachel Maddow is not like other cable news hosts. A self-described butch lesbian with short hair and black-rimmed glasses, off-camera she resembles a young Ira Glass more than the helmet-headed anchoresses and Fox fembots who populate television news. Doing the press rounds when MSNBC first announced her show in August, she’d show up to interviews looking like, she says, “a 14-year-old boy” in puffy Samantha Ronson sneakers with iPod headphones dangling from her ears—but then she’d easily segue into an informed foreign- policy or economic discussion that ended with a Daily Show–worthy punch line. Her résumé is similarly unexpected: A Rhodes scholar and an Oxford Ph.D., she’s done stints as an AIDS activist, barista, landscaper, Air America host, and mascot in an inflatable calculator suit. She’s a civics geek who reads comic books, goes to monster-truck rallies, likes to fish, calls herself an “amateur mixologist” of classic cocktails, and even Twitters.

[And I am now following those Tweets, most written by her producer Will, I suspect. Doesn't make me a stalker. Doesn't. Everybody on Twitter does it. So there!]

There’s something about the mix of personal details that is—to a young, educated, left-leaning, cosmopolitan audience—instantly recognizable. As one New York acolyte told me, “She is more like one of my friends than anyone else on television.” And her ratings have been astounding, especially in the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic. Maddow averaged a higher rating with that group than Larry King Live for thirteen of the first 25 nights she was on the air, enabling the network to out-rate CNN in that time slot for the first time. It’s an impressive feat, even given the fact that the show started two months before the election when political interest was at a fever pitch.     

“You come out of the gate as fast as she came out, it gives me incredible excitement,” thunders MSNBC president Phil Griffin. “We are stronger than we’ve been in twelve years. We have more swagger today than we have ever had. It’s because of Rachel. And trust me. The other guys see it. They are watching. And they are scared.”

[Hmm. I don't know how scared they are. More like relieved, cuz this breed of TV exec isn't usually known for his or her programming courage, so when one of them, oddly, sticks a neck out and takes a risk, the others can celebrate, cuz no TV exec ever lost a job for crassly imitating or copying a successful risk taken by someone else.

But the most interesting thing here to me is that Rachel defies imitation, because she is able to communicate actual SMARTS. And TV execs can try to bottle or imitate that until the cows come home, as legions of consultants rush out and prescribe all kinds of new formulas for new "smart" ways to deliver cable current events (can we still call it "news"?) content and water cooler conversation, but the "smart" has been so fully purged from this industry that you can only still find it in beleagered newsroom old timers, stubbornly holding on as young chippies promising 18-35 demo chippi-ness get promoted over them, over and over again.

So hey, Rachel, good on ya for showing that smart can be chic, and can pull ratings. What is bizarre is that you are doing it in a world where that very thought is considered a DEEPLY radical idea.

I mean, only in cable news (and I've personally witnessed this) can a writer be openly dressed down for taking a set of facts and writing a lead for a story, and by pure chance, accidentally use the same details and language in the same order as an NPR All Things Considered lead on the same story-- THE GREATEST SIN! If NPR did it a certain way, it is the sign of the devil, and we must write that same story differently, as a matter of principle, lest ANYONE remotely suspect any NPR-pointy-headed-wannabees were hired by accident.

Cable news likes to cast itself as the anti-NPR, and usually lives up to it, in much the same way teenagers think they are so independent when they rebel against their parents, without realizing that their behavior is still being utterly controlled by what the parents value, in the shallow opposition. It takes a good bit of time for a kid to grow up enough to develop real independence, and even then, some never grow out of holding views that are merely the anti- version of their parents' views.

That that kind of shallow reasoning had infected the management of a cable news channel at the time almost made me snort out loud, but I caught myself just in time, when I realized they were very serious.

That someone with Rachel Maddow's brains was even allowed into that world is remarkable in and of itself.

Yeah, but Maddow is my kind of pointy-head. Meaning the kind that can appreciate a fart joke! See the bold bit below.]

There’s not much of a dividing line between the material that gets slated for the TV show and what winds up on the radio. The second hour of the Air America show now features repackaged material from MSNBC, and even the original content is quite similar, with pet issues like national security and veterans’ rights taking the lead, plumped up with quirkier topics like comic books and News of the World–type oddities. “They’re both built around Rachel,” says Silverton-Peel. “Whatever interests Rachel every day.”

Maddow is reveling in the attention. “The most highly staffed show I worked at in the past had three people,” she says later. “Now there’s like all these people every day who are waiting to hear what I’m interested in, so we can turn that into the show.”

[...]

Insofar as there has been a plan. No one in Rachel Maddow’s life thought she would end up hosting a national cable news show. Her longtime friends and family members stress their pride, but they are clearly surprised at the path she’s taken. “Rachel, as I knew her, has always been about making a contribution,” says Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who was friends with Maddow at Stanford and Oxford. “She wasn’t just about giving commentary; she was an activist. She wanted to change the world.”

Maddow likes to joke that her admission to Stanford was a “mistake,” but her professors remember the Castro Valley, California, native as a serious scholar from the beginning. “She was a brilliant student,” says Roger Noll, former director of the Public Policy Program at Stanford, “one of those that only come around every few years or so.” When she graduated in 1994, her undergraduate thesis—which explored the shift in the perception of AIDS patients from “the other” to “one of us”—won a medal for excellence. “I still send students to that thesis as a model,” says another professor, Debra Satz.

[...]

But at Oxford, Maddow felt restless and out of place. A few months into the program, she put her doctorate on hold, traded her Oxford apartment for a London squat, and became the general manager of a fledging organization called the AIDS Treatment Project. “Rachel took me to a public-housing project,” says Booker. “That was where she was hanging out, in this London version of a tough neighborhood. It wasn’t like it was a sociology project. Most Oxford kids wouldn’t have even known that neighborhood existed.”       

Eventually she ran out of money and moved back to the United States to finish her dissertation, settling in Massachusetts, since it was far away from home and relatively free of distractions. “I wanted to live somewhere where I would be forced to do what I had to do,” she says. She crashed with friends and took up a number of odd jobs to support herself.

She was scrubbing out coffee barrels at a friend’s coffee shop in Northampton one morning when the local rock station announced it was holding an open audition for a “sidekick” for “Dave in the Morning,” known for its wacky parodies of popular songs. Maddow liked the idea of “a new, odder job,” she says. “And anyway I had to support myself. I wasn’t like a trust-fund kid.”

[...]

The job mostly consisted of reading the headlines of the day and setting up punch lines for Morning Dave. “She was one of the wittiest, smartest people I’ve ever met,” says Brinnel, but not too smart for morning-show humor. “One day, we got into a discussion about farts,” he says. “And I just remember her stopping and going, ‘Wait a minute: There is nothing funnier than a fart.’ ”

But it soon became clear to her co-workers that “Dave in the Morning” was not going to be her last job in broadcast. “Not in an obnoxious way,” says Bruce Stebbins, a former co-owner of the station. He remembers trying to engage Maddow in a political conversation back in the late nineties. “I realized immediately that I was just like way out of my league,” he says. “She just had such a powerful intellect. I remember thinking, ‘What is she doing here?’ ”

[...]

“I do worry if being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be,” she says. “Yeah, I’m the unlikely cable news host. But before that I was the unlikely Rhodes scholar. And before that I was the unlikely kid who got into Stanford. And then I was the unlikely lifeguard. You can always cast yourself as unlikely when you’re fundamentally alienated in your worldview. It’s a healthy approach for a commentator.”

[...]

Maddow first came on MSNBC’s radar in 2005, when she auditioned as a foil for the conservative Tucker Carlson’s show. Bill Wolff, Carlson’s producer at the time, was immediately smitten. “She was unbelievably prepared,” he said. “And she just killed him.”

[I will happily give Tucker Carlson the most credit for getting Rachel Maddow on the teevee, but despite his good judgment in that area, I have to say, it wouldn't take much logic to shred his political positions, as he usually only has two: repeating GOP talking points, or feigning outrage that someone taking a political position with more logical force and support than his would "stoop to that level" he deems as conveniently beyond the pale.

Now, shredding Tucker Carlson with charisma and grace when the cameras are rolling, that is a true skill to be admired. But most of my past freshman comp students could out-argue Carlson on a bad day, and about any grad student who has ever defended a thesis could run circles around his absurd non-logic. I'm not just slamming Tucker. I was forced to watch CNN's Crossfire daily for at least 2 years as part of my job. I can go into imitations of him on cue.]     

She bobbed around as a guest commentator for three years, appearing as a regular guest on Carlson’s show, but also on Paula Zahn’s and Larry King’s. At one point, she filmed a pilot for a weekend political show with CNN. “She seemed really constrained there,” says a person involved in the program. “It was like they didn’t know what to do with her.” The pilot never went anywhere. CNN president Jon Klein says it was because having an “obviously liberal” host didn’t fit with the mission of the network: “It’s like, you wouldn’t put The Sopranos on Comedy Central.”

[OK, the irony here is killing me. I'm vaguely aware of the time frame when this decision was made, and what we got instead from those rounds of "screen tests" at Headline News (the unspeakably awful Glenn Beck). Just think, back at that time, in an alternative universe, I could have found myself proudly working for the network that launched Rachel Maddow. I could have applied for staff jobs on her show. I'd probably be still working there to this day, if that had been the case. Life could have been completely and inalterably different. Don't pinch me. I might wake up!]

Still, she kept at it. “I think deep down, Rachel knows that this is something she has to do,” says her former radio co-host Chuck D. “She kind of looks at the television and thinks, I know that’s something I have to do well. Sometimes it’s not up to you.”

Her break came when Carlson’s show was canceled last year and Olbermann asked her to appear more frequently on Countdown. He admired the way Maddow had excoriated Carlson on his own turf, punctuating her arguments with a friendly laugh, like an athlete offering her hand to the loser after a winning game. “We were friends from the start,” says Olbermann. “Our worldviews overlap.”

[...]

Most people would obsess over the competition—Olbermann’s fixation with Bill O’Reilly ignited his career. But Maddow says she doesn’t want to absorb any “homogenizing influences.” She recognizes that part of her on-air charm comes from being unschooled enough to take risks: to explain Dada, or spend 22 seconds reading from John Hodgman’s book, or lavish airtime on Zimbabwe’s new $10 trillion bill. She gets her information mostly from the Internet, then picks what she thinks is interesting.

[I'm really being silly here, but I can't help noticing similarities. Besides my own love of fart jokes (and of putting fart jokes in inappropriate places), this is also what I loved doing when I was at CNN, working on the headline ticker at Headline News. While the salary there cost me thousands of dollars in student loan deferment interest, I loved having a job that allowed me to do precisely what Rachel has leveraged above: to cast an idiosyncratic eye across the landscape of the planet, and pull out those nuggets that grab your sensibility with a sense of "what the... ?" My job on the ticker could be described thusly: read everything in the world, and pull headlines out of it. Unlike the CNN "crawl," they even let me put jokes in there. Even, when nobody was looking, fart jokes.]

This is not to say that Maddow doesn’t have opinions about cable news. For starters, she loathes the format that casts the host as a referee between squabbling guests and has vowed to have only one speaking guest at a time, because, she’s says, it’s more respectful. “You’re essentially watching for the kinetic activity of the fight rather than listening to what anybody says about the issue,” she says. “And I think what people end up cheering for is winning, you know, rather than getting something out of it. I think there’s more intelligent ways to entertain people.”

She also does not abide impoliteness: In March, when Pat Buchanan told Democratic strategist Kelli Goff to “shut up” on Dan Abrams’s show, on which Maddow was also a guest, she leaped in to administer such a deft, polite scolding—“Pat! I have never heard you tell anyone to shut up like that before!”—that the former Nixon speechwriter looked genuinely chastened. Buchanan, whose 1992 culture-war speech was a pivotal moment for 19-year-old lesbian Maddow, now frequently appears on The Rachel Maddow Show to provide conservative counterpoint under the rubric “It’s Pat,” which he most likely doesn’t know is a reference to the old Saturday Night Live skit about a gender-neutral character. “Thank you so much for coming on, Pat. Always a pleasure,” she says warmly when he totters off after their sparring matches.

“Even though I can be harsh in my criticism and I can be strong in my beliefs, I try not to be mean,” she says. “And I don’t have a very high tolerance for other people who are cruel or personally insulting in a way that I think is meant to humiliate people.”

[...]

Maddow counts Countdown, the only cable news she really watches, as an influence. “The thing that I think he doesn’t get enough credit for is how much information is in it,” she says. “That show is produced to within a half-second of its life.” As she talks about it, she becomes more animated. “Put a lot of information out there. People can handle it. It’s okay to use big words. You don’t need to dumb stuff down! You don’t need to make stuff simple and repetitive for people. If you assume that your audience is as interested in what you are talking about as you are, you’re going to connect with your audience in a much better way.” She might not be saving the world, but she is intent on making it a little smarter.

[...]

You know, Rachel, I think that last quotation is destined to go into my random quotation hall of fame, up in the banner of this blog.

But what I like best about it, besides that it says such an important thing, is that the statement is being made from inside the cable news channel hothouse where the very idea of NOT dumbing everything down is not just massively radical, it also challenges the basic article of faith in that media genre.

Can I just give that a big ol' WHOOO HOOOO!!!!!!!!!??

PRIDE! Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stand poised on the edge of a historic opportunity

Link: Ending Her Bid, Clinton Backs Obama - NYTimes.com.

Link: Op-Ed Columnist - Bob Herbert - Savor the Moment for a Historic Campaign - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

Link: Op-Ed Columnist - Gail Collins - What Hillary Clinton Won - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.

As the TV blowhards blather on about general mindless crap they scat with after political speeches, I just have to pause for a moment and savor Senator Hillary Clinton's concession speech today, as she suspends her campaign (wording there is very important) and unequivocally throws her support to Senator Barack Obama.

It was a historic speech, and one that had me clapping in my living room more times than those fake manufactured applause moments in the usual State of the Union presidential speeches.

So am I one of those "wounded feminists burning up the Internet," as Gail Collins called us above? The passions of the feminist movement are as much with me as they ever were, and they are the reason I watched every word of Hillary's concession speech today with my heart in my throat, and the memory of every glass ceiling I've ever banged into as fresh in my mind as ever.

I LOVE that the feminists emerged from out of the 30 years of history they'd been relegated to by the media and culture, as if they were as dead as the suffragists. And more important, I LOVE that many of those original women who won their right to vote in the early 20th century returned to the front lines again.

Oh, I've been in love with those wonderful League of Women Voters ladies for years, and I sit and talk with them at the polls whenever I find one of their often elderly poll-watchers.

Those crappy pundits say her "celebratory tone" in this terrific speech was an audition to be Obama's Vice President, which is about all they can see. Not surprising, most of them are men, and that is all they can see because that is all their sexist blinders let them see.

This speech was a celebration for women, and for all the other traditional and populist constituencies that haven't seen the light of day for so long, from people without health care, to the vanishing middle class and the threat of deep poverty that a looming recession brings for all of us, just one twist of fate away.

Yeah, I know as well as anyone that the Clintons always brought a mixed bag, doing whatever they could within the frame of politics as the art of the possible. I remember the awful disappointment, after that empowering and massive March on Washington in 1993, when the Clinton administration turned on the gays and lesbians who supported them so strongly, because GA DEMOCRAT Sen. Sam Nunn decided to single-handedly strong-arm  "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" into place in the military. It was a slap in the face, but unlike others at the time, I knew the politics of the situation well enough to know that if I were on the receiving end of Nunn's threats, I may have had to capitulate to them as well. Ironically, the Clinton Administration did better standing up to Newt Gingrich's Congressional strong-arming than it did to more Machiavellian Democrats in Congress (damn, I miss Paul Wellstone too! I miss him all the time).

I don't care about that mixed bag. Hillary Clinton will have my support whenever she wants it. She became, in the course of this campaign, one of the most courageous and strong human beings I've ever seen. I love that she stayed in the campaign as long as she did in the face of unfair media coverage and unprecedented chauvinistic media activism, and I'd have loved a brokered convention even more.

I love that she was smart like a fox "suspending" her campaign, so her delegates remain hers, for the history books, as a bargaining chip. All those MALE pundits seemed to demand she just capitulate without a word, with a sense of male entitlement that made me gag. I feel that such a demand that would have never been made of a man, and was never demanded of other male presidential candidates who went all the way to the convention with a much smaller and less historic percentages of the popular vote.

But what I really want right now is to find a transcript of this speech, so I can pull my favorite parts out of it.  I titled this post PRIDE because there is NO OTHER WORD for what I feel about this historic campaign by this historic woman.

That I met her 30 years ago in Arkansas gives it more poignancy for me personally, just as Bill Clinton's election in 1992 moved me strongly as well. (Arkansans never expect to win in the end... long conditioning of a small and often-overlooked state, because as much as we love the Razorbacks, they do have a tendency to often fall short in the big game. So when we win one, the celebration is bigger,  because the fight is as underdogs, with no real expectation of winning. Hillary's relentless focus on the White House without considering the possibility of defeat is a part of Arkansas she carries with her, because defeat is such a more likely norm, you always operate with that subtext, and fight like a wild boar--Go Hogs!-- anyway, no matter what anyone says about you.)

So PRIDE! Hillary won! This was not defeat, because Hillary won what needed to be won for us, as Obama wins what also needs to be won for us. This presidential race (and the GOP hasn't gotten the word yet, but they will, because there have been GOP populists before, real ones, not Rovian manipulators of Joe Sixpack demographic categories) for the first time in my memory is about candidates as true symbols for a movement of real people, not candidates as candidates, They are candidates WE, not candidates Me, I. This was brought out on Bill Moyers last night. Other presidential candidates in the past have had to go in search of a movement, but these candidates have found their movement, and for the first time in my memory, the movement is more important than the point person who gets designated to give the movement a voice.

Obama still isn't fully my cup of tea. Too young, too cultivated, too close to the machine (Hillary is cultivated and close to the machine as well, but we have seen examples of how she acts in a position of power in those circumstances, and we have no similar examples with Obama). But that's not enough to offend me. I do love what he's doing, and the symbol he is painting himself to be.

I just wish he'd drop the fake Southern accent word-endings in speeches, the eh- sound of the genteel plantation South (not rough hill country Ozark South), mixed with self-consciously-used preacher cadences. I understand why he is doing it, and what he wants to evoke, and I don't deny it does what he wants it to do. I also know Martin Luther King Jr. was criticized for some for having an "academic" voice and a "preacher" voice, and for being an adept code-switcher. I don't even have anything against that. MLK actually WAS from Atlanta, tho, and his preacher voice didn't sound so much like an affectation, since he actually WAS a preacher, and that's the part that bugs me about Obama's use of it. Blah.

But I will back Obama as fiercely as I back Hillary, not because of either one of them, but because I sense potential in the populist movement they given a reason to arise. That's the magic part, isn't it?

I mean, think about it. The feminists didn't go away by the mid-80s. They were still kicking around, even as attention went elsewhere with the failure of the E.R.A. Many built empires in academia, where they embraced post-modernism and acted as if all the activists had fought so hard for was automatically achieved, so all they had left to do was gaze endlessly into relativistic cultural navels, because everything had "always already" happened (the freaky post-conservatism conservatism of postmodernism), instead of fighting for deeply oppressed women globally, those multi-cultural women the pomos had theories for, yet whom they rarely actually encountered, except on Fulbright exchange programs (Fulbright--see? everything comes back to Arkansas!).

Hillary Clinton was still out there duking it out tho, going to the World Conference on Women in China in 1995 (to be fair, some academic feminists I know were involved with this conference as well).

But what is bringing U.S. feminists back out of the woodwork, out of the closet, out of the lowered expectations the revenge of the glass ceiling has brought them? The Chauvinist Piggies came out in force, and by god, that was OFFENSIVE. We'd already been putting up with a lot, but when the Piggies got up on TeeVee and went all oink oink, that was just too much. Suddenly Hillary wasn't just Hillary any more. She became all of US who had ever been oinked at by a Piggie. Just WHO did they think they WERE?!

That was probably what killed E.R.A., you know? A different time, but there had been enough of a reduction in general piggie-ness that nobody really had a bee in their bonnet about it. Nobody had their panties in a twist. It just lost steam.

Think too about the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the U.S.  It has a history of ups and downs since the time of Lincoln, but most tellingly, the civil rights MOVEMENT needed something to get outraged over, something to make them turn out in numbers. Jim Crow provided that public dose of bigotry in several different forms, from segregated schools, bathrooms, drinking fountains, lunch counters, buses and trains. The courts also "helped," as did George Wallace and Orval Faubus.

It is crass movement politics to seek out, create, or exploit such moments or incidents.  Yet Rosa Parks was chosen for her role to be a symbol, as did others in test cases created to push the courts to overcome or show their bigotry.

In this case, tho, this LONG primary campaign was the exigence, the bully pulpit that brought the Piggies and the Bigots out of the woodwork and trotted out by the unconsciously right-wing media, with all the irony that entails (yes, I was embarrassed by the racists in Southern states Hillary unfortunately had to embrace, because they are working class Democrats and do deserve a voice about real working class issues, but oh, I just had to hold my nose).

Do we want to abandon those folks to the GOP who will vote to chop the tops off their mountains and fill in valleys with slag? Do we want to blow off the real health issues the terrible pollution in these coal-mining areas are bringing to these people's children, just because they happen to have a cultural tradition of racism? Or do we want to keep them in the Dem tent, and plan programs that might lead to greater cross-cultural and class and race-based understanding and solidarity?

And no, I do not think the Clintons "chose" to play any race card whatsoever, or to adopt a Nixon-esque "Southern strategy." That is utter horseshit, and was manufactured by Obama campaign handlers or Rovian dirty-tricksters or god knows what, I but I know the Clintons and how they feel about African Americans, and there is not a racist bone in either of them, as I saw in things they did in Arkansas, with no national spotlight on them. There was a truly odd tone among some Obama supporters, who tried to use a rhetorical frame that anyone who would oppose Obama's historic campaign must be racist, by the very act of opposing it, and Hillary as his primary opponent must therefore be racist because of it. Besides being an absurd false dilemma fallacy, it is also a bizarre attempt to manipulate the dominant stupidity of tape recorder journalism, which has no problem repeating false dilemma fallacies unchecked and ad nauseum.

Difficulties will arise with trying to unify and deal with the cultural differences between African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S., and that may be a bigger challenge for the Dems than racist bigots. Dems will have a challenge healing that divide by bringing all into one tent, united for civil rights for all, especially the poorest of us. But is the alternative leaving the more conservative Catholic Hispanics to join with the GOP and be exploited and blown off, imprisoned and deported, abused and kept as a permanent invisible underclass living in semi-legal slave-like conditions?

That is an exciting opportunity for Senator Clinton and Senator Obama to approach head on, if they can unite their constituencies as a single MOVEMENT and a united ticket. I believe a united ticket is an IMPERATIVE to ride this movement to its natural next populist step.

Yes, Obama MAY be able to be elected to president without Hillary on the ticket, but what price must he pay to do so? He will not have the votes to lay claim to a full-on movement. But Hillary and Obama together can be the less important figureheads to something more important, the actual populist movement behind them, to which they both have made noises to the desire to give it voice.

Noises, but are the noises the real thing, or political opportunism, a motive that simply disappears once the goal has been reached? Hillary's speech today (and her actions of the past 40 years) lead me to believe her noises are the real thing. Obama's community organizing and superior campaign organization do give me hope that for him too the movement is more important than personal glory. He possibly could gain office without it (as most presidential candidates have done in modern history, running for the office as a man, not a voice for a movement. Not since RFK, I don't think, has a candidate run as a voice for a movement. Even his own brother did not. Jesse Jackson may have tried, but his own personality overshadowed the aborted attempt at a movement, the Rainbow Coalition).

But if they chose to lead the movement (and the movement must necessarily direct them, not the other way around, that is the mark of real movement leadership, that the leader is a wise servant of a populist moment), they could do something far more historic than just the amazing list of "firsts" that they've already compiled and will continue to compile. That would be the hope Obama would like to invoke in his "Yes We Can" chant for "change."

I had more hope from Hillary's track record than Obama's speech-making wind that she could deliver, but together, maybe they could keep the focus in the right place.

It is most historic, I think, more so than the first woman or first African American, as an emblem, to run for an office, to see a movement rise up around the exigence of that agon, the campaign struggle, a populist movement that needed the outrages of the Bush years to get their dander and gumption up, to be their "Jim Crow," to be their "Iron My Shirt!" moment, to make their voices heard.

That's the real reason my overwhelming emotion at this moment is Pride.   

You know marketers are confused about Earth Day when...

This takes the cake. I happened to catch a page from the NY Post while in the subway today. An ad for Bloomingdale's department store in NYC caught my eye.

A sexy-looking guy is featured in some green-ish hued jeans and a blue t-shirt with the word "PEACE."

The promotion is for an Earth Day event at Bloomingdale's, called "Dress for the Planet."

OK, so what's wrong with this picture? The store wants to support Earth Day, is running a promotion, with a supposedly low-energy free concert, and is collecting old, "gently worn" clothing, which it will exchange for a pass to buy at a discount some NEW machine-ripped and gently fake-worn clothing!

No, it isn't even that reasonable. This is USING Earth Day as an opportunity for a SALE, like on President's Day or Labor Day. Sales exist to drive consumption, expressly, to INCREASE consumption (go to Bloomies and hack up a lung, you think that might make 'em happy?).

Bloomingdale's marketers are saying, "Oh, Ye Wonderful Earth-conscious People, come to our store and support the planet by BUYING more stuff that kills the planet!"

George Orwell would have been proud. This is truly doublespeak at its finest.

What does it mean (as Martin Luther might say) if those responsible for fueling the engine that drives the industrial consumption of the planet (not to mention the low-wage slavery of most of its people) not only to claim to be on the side of NOT DOING the very thing that is their highest goal as a corporation (increasing share-holder value), but also encourage us to follow the same contradictory purpose and HONOR THE EARTH by coming out to Bloomingdale's for a great sale for a good cause, you know, DESTROYING THE EARTH?

And the PEACE the sexy model's T-Shirt proclaims? Consumption, and the energy its engines require are precisely what fuels our current imperialist oil WARS, not to mention reinforcing energy-rich totalitarian states that big multi-nationals and super-powers keep in place, despite the violences and suppression (the opposite of PEACE) enacted against those peoples.

Yes, yes, we can all join in! Sing along in our anthem, follow the bouncing sale price label! Let us all celebrate Earth Day in the properly capitalist interpretation of its meaning, by CONSUMING THE EARTH MORE!

Increased consumption is, or can be made to be, after all, the answer to EVERY question. The Bloomingdale's sale proves it.

Is Amazon trying to monopolize the empowering "citizen media" Publish-On-Demand market?

UPDATE 3/30/08: A commenter below (A.F. Stewart) has left a link for an online petition against Amazon's new policy, and I wanted to make it live and promote it also up here at the top of the post:

Buy buttons have now been disabled, (PublishAmerica and Whiskey Press) and Amazon's policy is to do it to all who don't fall into line.

Voice your protest, sign the petition.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protectPOD

Thanks for the link, A.F.!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

I am republishing this courageous post from Writer's Weekly in its entirety, in order to help spread the word. That Amazon.com (normally quite supportive of key aspects of the Citizen Media Movement and its most democratizing elements) would attempt such a thing just leaves me speechless.

I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that the negative PR from such a heavy-handed move by a key gatekeeper rebounds badly and forces Amazon to allow the POD books the same rights and privileges as ANY published book with its own ISBN number.

Could you imagine Amazon dictating such a policy to any small university or literary press? What about selected political publishing houses devoted to giving voice to the Thomas Paines of our day?

Amazon made its name by becoming an online equivalent of our Library of Record. Google has now entered that arena, and the competition was necessary, but we can't expect the Barnes & Noble to take up that mantle, and I don't think it could; its interface is too weak and its devoted user base too also-ran. Many of the affected writers are turning to B&N as an alternative, and that could be a good move, if for nothing else, it could help B&N become a better true competitor to Amazon, but B&N has a long way to go.

Could it really be that Amazon is trying to bite the Long Tail that feeds it?

The Internet can be a truly open space only so long as our searches remain honest. Both Amazon and Google have an obligation to citizens of cyberculture not to go all border collie on us and use their power as gate-keepers at their leveraged choke-points of power as oppressive agents of social control against more democratizing forces online.

I hope to follow this issue more in the future, as I learn more about what's happening here, and Amazon's reaction to a public backlash. I should note that key groups particularly affected by this development are FANWRITERS, a massive constituency of fan fiction writers online who develop their skills and corpus of works in specific fandom communities. I have analyzed this social citizen media phenomena in my dissertation, and in the years since, have followed the careers of many successful writers who have "graduated" from fandom audiences to POD, often bringing their own quite sizable audience of fans with them. The effects of this move by Amazon below on the vast worlds of specific fandoms is just chilling.

The good news, which Amazon may not have realized, is that online fandoms are not simply intensely-focused affinity groups. As I also found in my dissertation, they are highly-organized activist organizations. While charities (on the positive side) cable television production houses and networks (on both the positive and negative side) are most often the targets of their organized activism (other sectors of politics and business should take note!), these fandom groups can easily turn on a dime and activate their bases against any target.

If Amazon should step back from this oppressive policy and I somehow miss it, please let me know, so I can also note the change here, when it happens. I have no interest in sharing this outrage in error, nor do I want to lose my faith in Amazon.

Say it ain't so! Please!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

March 27, 2008

Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else...

BREAKING DEVELOPMENT: We were notified by a PublishAmerica author that her book was available for purchase through Amazon on Tuesday but today the "buy" button for her book on Amazon is gone. We researched some other PublishAmerica books and it appears the "buy" button on Amazon has indeed been removed from the vast majority of their book pages.

PublishAmerica issued a press release today that states, "PublishAmerica will not comply with Amazon's ultimatum, and will not allow that company to dictate who will print PublishAmerica's books, and at what conditions."

~~~~~

Some Print on Demand (POD) publishers are privately screaming "Monopoly!" while others are seething with rage over startling phone conversations they're having with Amazon/BookSurge representatives. Why isn't anybody talking about it openly? Because they're afraid - very, very afraid.

Amazon.com purchased BookSurge, a small POD publisher/printer back in 2005. Amazon also lists and sells titles for the largest POD printer, Lightning Source, which is owned by Ingram (the large book distributor). According to their website, Lightning Source serves more than 4,300 publisher clients and has more than 400,000 titles in their system.

You'd think Amazon's purchase of BookSurge might have made things a bit uncomfortable between the two companies. However, they continued to work together, getting books on demand to Amazon.com's loyal customers. Things appeared to be cruising along just fine, but perhaps not anymore.

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon's Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted "free shipping" that Amazon offers.

Don't believe it? I didn't believe it either. I am Angela Hoy, the co-owner of POD services company BookLocker.com and publisher of WritersWeekly.com. I am well-known in the industry for my activism performed through WritersWeekly Whispers and Warnings. Over the years, we have helped writers recover tens of thousands of dollars in fees from deadbeat editors and publishers, helped them negotiate better contract terms, assisted writers in obtaining payment after their copyrights have been violated, and even assisted police in collecting evidence to prosecute criminals who have preyed on writers. I am also the author of 11 non-fiction books.

Still doubting the reports could really be true, I emailed an Amazon/BookSurge representative who's been trying to get us to talk to him by phone. John Clifford of Amazon/BookSurge called me at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

My first comment was to tell him we heard a rumor that POD publishers who didn't use BookSurge would have the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages turned off.

He said, "What? Who told you that? That's not true!"

I told him I'd heard some rumors from the "POD underground."

He said he'd previously tried to talk to my husband, Richard Hoy, the President and CEO of BookLocker. I explained that we had a very bad experience with BookSurge in the past and that he was, naturally, hesitant to do business with them again. (Google the words BookSurge complaint without any quotes to see other customers' comments about them as well.)

He claimed the people who worked for BookSurge back then are probably all gone (but that didn't explain the more recent complaints). He made his sales pitch, talking about percentages and such, and said many POD publishers are resisting their attempts to convert to BookSurge. Mr. Clifford also said BookSurge's aim was to help Amazon customers get their books faster.

What he didn't say was that Lightning Source not only packages books for Amazon customers in boxes that feature an Amazon.com return address label, but also drop-ships those orders directly to Amazon customers at Amazon's request. Hmm...

He stated several times that books not converted to BookSurge's system would be "taken down." Since that wasn't exactly what we'd heard, I asked about books that perhaps weren't selling well, that aren't good candidates for converting to BookSurge (books that would remain for sale through Lightning Source, but would never be converted to BookSurge due to the time/expense involved).

Contrary to what he stated at the very beginning of our conversation, Mr. Clifford finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives.

Mr. Clifford said authors of those books could participate in the Amazon.com Advantage Program, meaning they would have to pay Amazon $29.95 per year PLUS 55% of the list price of their book, as well as buy and then send those books to Amazon directly for them to warehouse and ship to customers.

I explained to him that we had more than 1500 books in print and that it would take quite awhile to convert all of those over to BookSurge's system. He said as long as the relationship was "moving forward" that the "buy" button would remain active on our authors' books that had not yet been switched.

Another comment Mr. Clifford made was that their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?!

I have to wonder if Jeff Bezos is even aware of what is going on within his organization. Here is Amazon's Vision Statement, taken directly from their website:

"Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."

What it doesn't say is, "Our customers can buy any print on demand book they might want online...as long as we also get paid to print it."

Nobody likes being backed into a corner, and saying "do this or else" naturally breeds angry rejection and hostility. If we did agree to sign the contract, pulling and transferring files to Amazon/Booksurge would take an enormous amount of time and money. From the POD publishers we've talked to, and from our own experience at BookLocker, we could all be looking at a dire and immediate threat of revenue cuts if we refuse to sign the Amazon/BookSurge contract. Most importantly, there could be an outcry from and potential financial hardship on the authors, who are completely innocent in all of this.

In BookLocker's opinion, and the opinion of all the fellow Lightning Source customers we talked to, the Amazon/BookSurge proposal does not appear attractive at all (yes, we obtained the contract and the file submission specifications). Amazon/BookSurge would make money two ways on Amazon.com sales - first the fee for printing the books, and then 48% of the list price of each sale through Amazon.com. Lightning Source allows its customers to set their own discount rate for Amazon and other retail sales, and does not force POD publishers or authors to pay "48%."

Furthermore, it could take the larger POD publishers months to submit their book files to Amazon/BookSurge, at a considerable cost and number of man-hours. This makes the deal even less attractive. Finally, while the initial list of books submitted by POD publishers could be submitted to Amazon/BookSurge for free, the contract states future books would cost $50 each to process. The cost for individual authors to publish through BookSurge is considerably more, with an average publishing package cost of more than $1,000.

Since Amazon/BookSurge does not offer Ingram distribution (Ingram distribution is considered imperative in the industry for bookstore sales), any company that accepts the Amazon/BookSurge deal, who desires to keep offering Ingram distribution, may need to maintain two copies of the book files. Since the Amazon/BookSurge current specs don't match the Lightning Source specs, future book files, both interior and cover, may need to be formatted separately. So, they would have to pay double the setup fees and might have to do double the formatting work as well...or pay designers to do double the formatting work.

Likewise, self-published authors who believe they must have Ingram Distribution AND an active "buy" button on Amazon to be successful may need to pay double the setup fees (to a POD publisher AND Amazon/BookSurge), and also may need to create two separate sets of formatted files.

In the event where two versions of a book might be available, Mr. Clifford said the Amazon/BookSurge version of the POD book would trump (override) the version offered by Lightning Source on Amazon.com.

AMAZON WAS BUILT BY BOOKS....That Were Written By AUTHORS

When authors get wind of this, we believe they are going to be livid. Authors are also readers. They love books. We suspect they buy from Amazon in droves. I, myself, have been an Amazon junkie for years, not only heavily promoting Amazon.com in my non-fiction books for writers and on our very popular website, WritersWeekly.com, but also listing my own books for sale there, ordering other authors' books, DVDs and numerous other products as well. I pulled up our Amazon customer account and looked at our receipts. We've spent $1508.81 at Amazon.com in the past six months. Multiply that by the number of authors this will affect...authors who, like me, have a multitude of websites to choose from when doing their shopping online.

In addition, authors participate in the Amazon experience, via blogs on the website, by posting reviews about other books, and more, activities that help to continually make Amazon bigger and better. Authors are a loyal bunch! For years, they've been faithfully sending their readers to Amazon.com, again and again, even when they earned lower royalties for doing so.

It's not inconceivable to think that this group, if shoved against a wall like this, won't simply pledge their allegiance elsewhere. Let's face it, BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping on orders of $25 or more, too. Authors can change the links to their book pages on their websites, in their ezines and press releases, and even in their email signatures to their book's page at BarnesandNoble.com. Authors can spend their own money elsewhere as well (as I plan to do). I imagine BarnesandNoble.com will be very happy to process the extra book sales that could result from all of this.

Amazon.com might also upset countless companies that have Amazon Affiliate bookstores on their websites (many authors have these, too!). If Amazon/BookSurge were to follow through with turning off the "buy" buttons for thousands of POD titles, customers following those links from other websites could be confused and annoyed. After clicking on a link, they would find no easy way to purchase the book directly from Amazon, and no way to obtain free shipping on that book, even if they're willing to buy more products to meet the $25 free shipping threshold. One would think Amazon must know the free shipping strategy works to upsell customers on additional products. That's why they offer it. Without it, these customers could have no incentive to buy more products because the product they surfed in to buy does not qualify.

One has to wonder if traditional publishers will be next? Will Amazon eventually require all books sold through Amazon.com to be printed by BookSurge?

Let's all hope and pray this situation is one huge, misguided idea from some mid-level management person and not corporate policy being dictated from the office of Jeff Bezos.

What can you do? Let Amazon know what you think about this "offer" by Amazon/BookSurge.

The names of their Officers and Directors are here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govManage

Amazon's Investor Relations Team email address appears near the bottom of this page: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq

Their address is:

Amazon.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226

Next, tell your author friends, your book buyers, your website visitors, your ezine subscribers and everyone else about this situation. Amazon.com was built on books. Books are written by authors. Unfortunately, it appears authors may ultimately be the innocent pawns in this power struggle.

~~~~~

[...]

Angela Hoy is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, which offers free job listings and paying markets for freelance writers every Wednesday. Subscribe at WritersWeekly.com. She is also the publisher at BookLocker, which offers full-service, affordable print on demand publishing and free ebook publishing.

~~PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHORS FROM ANGELA~~

There is no reason to panic. We are not aware of any cases yet where the "buy" button has been removed. It is possible, after recognizing everyone's concerns, that Amazon might change its mind.

If they do turn off the "buy" buttons, though, not having an active "buy" button on Amazon.com is not the end of the world.

After selling books for eight years, it has been our experience that "chance purchases" of self-published books on Amazon.com are not the norm. Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don't market them, and sell zero copies. For most self-published authors, sales are almost always author-driven, meaning the bookstore link you use in your marketing efforts is what's driving your sales, not just simply having your book listed on Amazon.com.

We know from experience that the customer is going to buy your book from where you tell them to buy your book. If you want your customers to qualify for free shipping, you can send them to BarnesandNoble.com, and tell them their order might qualify for free shipping (many people don't know BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping!).